Meet the Woman Curating Seattle's Most Interesting Art Gallery

At Mount Analogue, Colleen Louise Barry takes a multifaceted look at Seattle arts

By Danielle Hayden August 18, 2018

This article originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of Seattle magazine.

This article appears in print in the September 2018 issue. Read more from the Fall Arts Preview feature story here. Click here to subscribe.

“The things I wanted to see in this city either weren’t here or weren’t accessible to me,” says Colleen Louise Barry, an artist, poet and curator who moved to Seattle from Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2016. She opened Mount Analogue (Pioneer Square, 300 S Washington St.) just over a year ago in what was formerly the G. Gibson Gallery in Pioneer Square.

In that short amount of time, Mount Analogue—part of an arts collective in the space that includes indie publisher Cold Cube Press, Specialist, a contemporary art gallery and Gramma, a poetry press, for which Barry serves as editor—has evolved into a magnetic community arts center, bookshop and publishing studio that hosts monthly exhibits across disciplines and forms, sometimes even beyond gallery walls. That was the case with her late-spring exhibit, A Lone, a group show exploring the idea of connection and loneliness in our digitally fragmented world, which was installed on billboards and signposts across the city. It challenged the idea of what a traditional gallery does—or should do—while providing provocative context to explore the exhibition’s thesis.

Other recent shows have featured the poetry of Seattle civic poet Anastacia-Renée; a corporeal mime performance set against a papier-mâché set from musician Jess Joy, aka the Singing Mime; and a BDSM opera (with one $30 performance accompanied by a “whipping from your cast member of choice”).

“I wanted to create a space [where] you have this immersive experience with other people. It’s like when you go to a concert and everybody is singing this song, and you get that feeling like you’re high; I wanted to create that…I ask artists when they come into this space to really think about the experience of it and to really try and transform the space.”

Upcoming fall shows:
Designer, comic, musician and artist Aidan Fitzgerald, Content Aware, 9/6–9/30
Tattoo and performance artist MKNZ, self-titled, 10/4–10/28
Artist and illustrator Tara Booth, self-titled, 11/1–11/25
Painter Sara Long, Building a Body of Light, 12/6–12/30